I once lived a block away from a beach in Northern California, and when my sons and I wandered the sands at low tide, we often saw sea anemones attached to the rocks, closed up and looking much like rocks themselves, waiting for the water to return. My sons, fans of Finding Nemo, still find these animals intriguing because of their association with a cartoon clownfish, but as it turns out, these brainless organisms have a few lessons to teach the grownups about the art of war.

Attack of the clones

Anemones, which look like plants that open and close with the rise and fall of the tides, are really animals from the phylum Cnidaria, which makes them close relatives of corals and jellyfish. Although they do provide a home for clownfish in a mutualistic relationship, where both the clownfish and the anemone benefit from the association, anemones are predators. They consist primarily of their stinging tentacles and a central mouth that allows them to eat fish, mussels, plankton, and marine worms.

Although anemones seem to be adhered permanently to rocks, they can, in fact, move around. Anemones have a “foot” that they use to attach to objects, but they also can be free-swimming, which comes in handy in the art of sea anemone warfare. (To see them in action, click on video, above.)

Sea anemone warfare could well be characterized as an attack of the clones. These animals reproduce by a process called lateral fission, in which new anemones grow by mitosis from an existing anemone, although they can engage in sexual reproduction when necessary. But when a colony of anemones is engaged in a battle, it consists entirely of genetically identical clones.

Yet even though they are identical, these clones, like the genetically identical cells in your liver and your heart, have different jobs to do in anemone warfare. Scientists have known that anemones can be aggressive with one another, tossing around stinging cells as their weapons of choice in battle. But observing groups of anemones in their natural environment is almost impossible because the creatures only fight at high tide, masked by the waves.

To solve this problem, a group of California researchers took a rock with two clone tribes of anemones on it into the lab and created their own, controlled high and low tides. What they saw astonished them. The clones, although identical, appeared to have different jobs and assorted themselves in different positions depending on their role in the colony.

Battle arms, or “acrorhagi”

The warring groups had a clearly marked demilitarized zone on the rock, a border region that researchers say can be maintained for long periods in the wild. When the tide is high, though, one group of clones will send out scouts, anemones that venture into the border area in an apparent bid to expand the territory for the colony. When the opposition colony senses the presence of the scouts, its warriors go into action, puffing up large specialized battle arms called acrorhagi, tripling their body length, and firing off salvos of stinging cells at the adventuresome scouts. Even warriors as far as four rows back get into the action, rearing up the toss cells and defend their territory.

In the midst of this battle, the reproductive clones hunker down in the center of the colony, protected and able to produce more clones. Clones differentiate into warriors or scouts or reproducers based on environmental signals interacting with their genes; every clonal group has a different response to these signals and arranges its armies in different permutations.

Poor Stumpy

Warriors very rarely win a battle, and typically, the anemones maintained their territories rather than achieving any major expansions. The scouts appear to run the greatest risk; one hapless scout from the lab studies, whom the researchers nicknamed Stumpy, was so aggressive in its explorations that when it returned to its home colony, it was attacked by its own clones. Researchers speculated that it bore far too many foreign stinging cells sustained in the attacks, thus resulting in a case of mistaken identity for poor Stumpy.